The workshop, which is now in its 9th year, aims to foster exchange and collaboration among scholars, students, and anyone with an interest in Early Modern Philosophy. This year’s workshop will focus on the topic of “Freedom and Evil” in Early Modern Philosophy (roughly the period from 1600-1800). We welcome submissions on the conference topic, which may be broadly construed to include the problem of free will, theodicy, political and social liberty, and evil practices[...]

Meeting Cancellation: The CUNY Graduate Center will be closed on Monday, March 4th. Therefore, the Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will not be meeting. There is no meeting I argue that racial injustice can make a subject’s news sources unreliable because of the effect of (1) racial prejudice and (2) society’s unjust structure on the news-gathering-and-disseminating processes a subject relies on. I assume that societies with entrenched racial injustice have widespread racial prejudices and that these[...]

We’re a community of philosophers of language centered in New York City. We have a meeting each week at which a speaker presents a piece of their own work relating to the philosophy of language. 28 January Luca Incurvati (ILLC/Amsterdam) 4 February Dan Hoek (NYU) 11 February Peter Klecha (Swarthmore) 25 February Ginger Schultheis (NYU/Chicago) and David Boylan (Rutgers) 4 March Chris Tancredi (Keio University, Tokyo) 11 March TBD 25 March Yael Sharvit (UCLA) 1[...]

What are laws of nature? The predominant view in contemporary philosophy of science is the Humean `best system account’ which holds that the laws of nature are merely descriptive, an efficient summary of contingent regularities that we find in the world. Using the concept of typicality, I will spell out a common anti-Humean intuition into a precise argument: A typical Humean world wouldn’t have any law-like regularities to begin with. Thus (I will argue), Humean[...]

Our topic for Spring 2018 will be Formal Frameworks for Semantics and Pragmatics. We’ll be investigating a range of questions in semantics and/or pragmatics which involve or are relevant to the choice between different kinds of overall structure for theories in these areas. In most sessions, the members of the seminar will receive a week in advance, copies of recent work, or work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading this work,[...]

Each colloquium is held on Wednesday at 4:15 P.M. All colloquia will take place at the Graduate Center in rooms 9204/9205 except as otherwise noted. Please call (212) 817-8615 for further information. Download an interactive PDF version of the schedule here. February 6 • Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture Ned Block (New York University) “Perception is Non-Propositional, Non-Conceptual and Iconic” February 13 Francesco Pupa (Nassau Community College) “Determiners are Phrases” February 20 Robert Rupert (University of[...]

I shall discuss some of the issues concerning a notorious doctrine of Frege that sentences are names of truth-values. I am interested in a problem raised by Kripke that the doctrine obscures the distinction between judgeable and unjudgeable contents. I shall present what I take to be Frege’s account of judgeable content. A proper expression of a judgeable content, for Frege, is susceptible to an analysis into a predicate and an argument-word, where a predicate[...]

When we’re asked to give examples of philosophical questions, we’re likely to think of questions that are very, very old. Is the physical world all there is? How should I live? How do we know what we know? But some philosophical problems are quite new, made possible or urgent by new developments in science and culture. These are often the most exciting problems to think through. On March 7th at 7:30 PM, Derek Skillings joins[...]

Two proof-systems P and P* are said to be complementary when one proves exactly the non-theorems of the other. Complementary systems come as a particular kind of refutation calculi whose patterns of inference always work by inferring unprovable conclusions form unprovable premises. In the first part of my talk, I will focus on LK*, the sequent system complementing Gentzen’s system LK for classical logic. I will show, then, how to enrich LK* with two admissible[...]

It is commonly claimed that mind-body dualism is entirely foreign to China—or “the East” more generally. This talk will explore how engaging with the cognitive sciences and digital humanities undermines claims such as this, and more broadly can help us to do our work as scholars of comparative philosophy. Embracing an embodied view of human cognition gets us beyond strong social constructivism and its accompanying cultural essentialism. In addition, new tools from the science and[...]

Philosophy-in-Manhattan Sunday, March 10 at 2:00 PM CUNY philosophy PhD candidate Liam Ryan will lead. Bishop George Berkeley is one the most original thinkers to grace philosophy. Considered one of the… Price: 14.00 USD https://www.meetup.com/Philosophy-in-Manhattan/events/257432871/

Russell proved over a century ago that a naive conception of structured propositions is inconsistent. Hodes (2015), Dorr (2016), and Goodman (2017) have recently reformulated Russell’s argument in the language of higher-order logic, and concluded from it that distinctions in reality cannot always reflect all the syntactic structure of the language in which we draw those distinctions. But they also float the idea that such distinctions might nevertheless have sentence-like structure, so long as this[...]

We’re a community of philosophers of language centered in New York City. We have a meeting each week at which a speaker presents a piece of their own work relating to the philosophy of language. 28 January Luca Incurvati (ILLC/Amsterdam) 4 February Dan Hoek (NYU) 11 February Peter Klecha (Swarthmore) 25 February Ginger Schultheis (NYU/Chicago) and David Boylan (Rutgers) 4 March Chris Tancredi (Keio University, Tokyo) 11 March TBD 25 March Yael Sharvit (UCLA) 1[...]

Our topic for Spring 2018 will be Formal Frameworks for Semantics and Pragmatics. We’ll be investigating a range of questions in semantics and/or pragmatics which involve or are relevant to the choice between different kinds of overall structure for theories in these areas. In most sessions, the members of the seminar will receive a week in advance, copies of recent work, or work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading this work,[...]

Each colloquium is held on Wednesday at 4:15 P.M. All colloquia will take place at the Graduate Center in rooms 9204/9205 except as otherwise noted. Please call (212) 817-8615 for further information. Download an interactive PDF version of the schedule here. February 6 • Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture Ned Block (New York University) “Perception is Non-Propositional, Non-Conceptual and Iconic” February 13 Francesco Pupa (Nassau Community College) “Determiners are Phrases” February 20 Robert Rupert (University of[...]

Vera List Professor of Philosophy, Richard J. Bernstein, will present his new book on Hannah Arendt, Why Read Hannah Arendt Now (2018, Polity Press), followed by a screening of the documentary film Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt. Free and open to the public.

Despite their importance in the history of philosophy and in particular in the work of Aristotle and Kant, mental capacities have been neglected in recent philosophical work. By contrast, the notion of a capacity is deeply entrenched in psychology and the brain sciences. Driven by the idea that a cognitive system has the capacity it does in virtue of its internal components and their organization, it is standard to appeal to capacities in cognitive psychology.[...]

Working Papers in Ethics and Moral Psychology is a speaker series conducted under the auspices of the Icahn School of Medicine Bioethics Program. It is a working group where speakers are invited to present well-developed, as yet unpublished work. The focus of the group is interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on topics in ethics, bioethics, neuroethics, and moral psychology. The meetings begin with a brief presentation by the invited speaker and the remaining time is devoted[...]

“Everyone is female”—this is the first of several “untenable claims” presented by Andrea Long Chu in her forthcoming book Females: A Concern (Verso, 2019). Drawing inspiration from Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and her forgotten play Up Your Ass, this lecture in numbered theses whips through a variety of ugly objects (films, manifestos, performance art, psychoanalysis, porn, and the alt-right) to give a portrait of femaleness as a universal category of self-ablation against which all politics—even feminist politics—revolts. Andrea Long Chu[...]

The Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) chapters of Columbia, NYU, Rutgers, and the Graduate Center, CUNY, invite submissions to the Spring 2019 NY-MAPWorks: a workshop series featuring the work of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows on topics in critical social philosophy and non-canonical areas of philosophy. Topics include, but are not limited to: social philosophy (including intersections with epistemology, language, and metaphysics), feminist philosophy and philosophy of sex and gender, philosophy of race, queer philosophy, non-western[...]

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students, postdocs, people who got their PhD within the last few years, advanced undergrads etc. – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2-3 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance,[...]

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students, postdocs, people who got their PhD within the last few years, advanced undergrads etc. – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2-3 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance,[...]

What does a philosopher look like? Inevitably, our mental pictures are shaped by the dominant imagery of the white male marble busts of Greco-Roman antiquity—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca—and their modern European heirs—Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Mill. Even today Western philosophy is largely male and overwhelmingly white—about 97 percent in the U.S., close to 100 percent in Europe. Diversifying the field requires expanding our corporeal imaginary of its practitioners. This conference, timed to honor[...]

There’s the question of what there is, and then there’s the question of what ultimately exists. Many contend that, once we have this distinction clearly in mind, we can see that there is no sensible debate to be had about whether there are such things as properties or tables or numbers, and that the only ontological question worth debating is whether such things are ultimate (in one or another sense). I argue that this is a mistake.[...]

John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association.” In a way that resonates with Confucian role ethics, the revolutionary Dewey particularizes the fact of associated living and valorizes it by developing a vision of the[...]

Professor Barbara Gail Montero is the director of (and a performer in) the upcoming multimedia, interdisciplinary event Curved Spacetimes: Where Friedrich Nietzsche Meets Virginia Woolf. Prof. Nickolas Pappas will also perform (reading spoken word as Friedrich Nietzsche), and Prof. Jonathan Gilmore is a member of the team that brought the project to fruition. According to the American Society for Aesthetics (who partially funded this project with a $7,000 grant), Curved Spacetimes is “multisensory event focused on the Physics, Aesthetics,[...]

Two ways of giving an epistemic justification of basic logical principles will be introduced, intuition-based accounts and concept or meaning constitution-based accounts. We will briefly consider different versions of these views and argue that they face parallel dilemmas. While ‘robust’ accounts are subject to what I call the ‘adoption problem,’ ‘weak’ accounts fail to ground our basic inferential dispositions. Either way, intuitions and meaning-constituting rules turn out to be irrelevant. A more general moral for[...]

Our topic for Spring 2018 will be Formal Frameworks for Semantics and Pragmatics. We’ll be investigating a range of questions in semantics and/or pragmatics which involve or are relevant to the choice between different kinds of overall structure for theories in these areas. In most sessions, the members of the seminar will receive a week in advance, copies of recent work, or work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading this work,[...]

Each colloquium is held on Wednesday at 4:15 P.M. All colloquia will take place at the Graduate Center in rooms 9204/9205 except as otherwise noted. Please call (212) 817-8615 for further information. Download an interactive PDF version of the schedule here. February 6 • Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture Ned Block (New York University) “Perception is Non-Propositional, Non-Conceptual and Iconic” February 13 Francesco Pupa (Nassau Community College) “Determiners are Phrases” February 20 Robert Rupert (University of[...]

We’re a community of philosophers of language centered in New York City. We have a meeting each week at which a speaker presents a piece of their own work relating to the philosophy of language. 28 January Luca Incurvati (ILLC/Amsterdam) 4 February Dan Hoek (NYU) 11 February Peter Klecha (Swarthmore) 25 February Ginger Schultheis (NYU/Chicago) and David Boylan (Rutgers) 4 March Chris Tancredi (Keio University, Tokyo) 11 March TBD 25 March Yael Sharvit (UCLA) 1[...]

AY 2018 – 19 Workshop Schedule September 25th – Avery Archer (GWU) October 16th – Daniel Singer (Penn) November 13th – Ariel Zylberman (SUNY Albany) February 26th – Vita Emery (Fordham) March 26th – Kathryn Tabb (Columbia) April 23rd – Carol Hay (UMass Lowell) The Epistemology and Ethics group is composed of faculty and graduate students at Fordham and other nearby universities. Papers are read in advance, so the majority of the time is devoted[...]

Our topic for Spring 2018 will be Formal Frameworks for Semantics and Pragmatics. We’ll be investigating a range of questions in semantics and/or pragmatics which involve or are relevant to the choice between different kinds of overall structure for theories in these areas. In most sessions, the members of the seminar will receive a week in advance, copies of recent work, or work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading this work,[...]

Each colloquium is held on Wednesday at 4:15 P.M. All colloquia will take place at the Graduate Center in rooms 9204/9205 except as otherwise noted. Please call (212) 817-8615 for further information. Download an interactive PDF version of the schedule here. February 6 • Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture Ned Block (New York University) “Perception is Non-Propositional, Non-Conceptual and Iconic” February 13 Francesco Pupa (Nassau Community College) “Determiners are Phrases” February 20 Robert Rupert (University of[...]

Many philosophers have suggested that the aim of imaginative philosophical inquiry is not to provide right answers, but right questions. This means demonstrating why certain questions are meaningless, based on false assumptions, or become senseless when posed in a wrong context. The question in my title appears to be a good candidate for this type of philosophical inquiry and I will try to show why. However, I will also argue that posing the question is[...]

New York University’s Liberal Studies, in Collaboration with Nietzsche Circle, Presents: Nietzsche and the Disadvantage of History: The rise of Western Oikophobia More Info & RSVP: If you like to attend, Please RSVP by sending email to Luke Trusso at luke.trusso@gmail.com

The Philosophy Department of The New School for Social Research invites you to a conference in honor of the life and work of Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy Yirmiyahu Yovel. The conference will be on March 29th and 30th in the Wolff Conference Room, D1103, 6 E 16th Street. Celebrating Yirmiyahu Yovel Friday, March 29th Chair: Richard J. Bernstein 9 AM – 11 AM: Agnes Heller “The Other Within” 11 AM – 1 PM: Jay[...]

The theme of our conference, “Thinking and Living the Good Life,” asks participants to think upon what it means to live well in contemporary society, how we can know the right or best way to live, and the role of thought in the enterprise of human life. Evocative of ancient theories of virtue, the theme of the good life also bears on prominent areas of discussion in contemporary political philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics. Papers topics[...]

Propositional dynamic logic (PDL) is a framework for reasoning about nondeterministic program executions (or, more generally, nondeterministic actions). In this setting, nondeterminism is taken as a primitive: a program is nondeterministic iff it has multiple possible outcomes. But what is the sense of “possibility” at play here? This talk explores an epistemic interpretation: working in an enriched logical setting, we represent nondeterminism as a relationship between a program and an agent deriving from the agent’s[...]

Since Confucianism is an intergenerational phenomenon, it should have unique insights into ethical issues surrounding our obligations to future generations. In the first part of this discussion, I examine two contemporary Confucian perspectives on intergenerational ethics. Proponents of Confucian Role Ethics have developed an interpretation of xiao 孝 as “intergenerational reverence” that binds the community together over time by reference to shared cultural models and evolving ethical values. The Chinese thinker Jiang Qing in turn[...]